🧠 Project Board of the Month: Quarterly Goals [Business]

Miša Hennin

Hey there!

Last week, you might have seen our Quarterly Goals mind map template for planning strategic company goals. Today, we'll look at the step that comes after brainstorming - the step where you take real action to achieve your goals and improve operational processes and collaboration.

💡 Recognize this template? It's from @Nick Willemsens' webinar on quarterly goals! Watch it on demand here. 💡

Each task in this project board corresponds to one of the ideas in our Quarterly Goals mind map. As it is a kanban board, we move tasks from left to right depending on their position in the pipeline: We place newly created tasks in the Shortlist column and only move tasks on to the Confirmed column once we have secured the resources necessary for the goal to be worked on. Towards the end of the workflow, you can see an In Review column. We added this to ensure that all finished tasks/goals undergo a quality check before delivery.

How MeisterTask helps us plan our quarterly goals

In each task, we centralize all information relating to the goal by adding documentation in the attachments or comments. As a result, all stakeholders can quickly check for updates simply by viewing the relevant task. The benefits of MeisterTask go beyond this, however. Read on for more reasons to use MeisterTask for planning and monitoring your quarterly goals.

💡 Create a project template that can be duplicated every quarter! 💡

Using Automations So Nothing Falls Through the Cracks

With so many stakeholders and diverse responsibilities, things can easily fall through the cracks. After all, who is responsible for the board's upkeep? To help keep things tidy, organized and useful, we’ve added some automations. For example:

• Tasks are automatically assigned to the responsible individual when they are moved.
• Due dates are automatically updated as tasks are moved into pre-determined sections.
• Email notifications are automatically sent to update stakeholders of any progress.
• Tasks are automatically marked as complete when they are moved to the final column.

Using Timeline to Improve Goal Completion Rates

Most of our team uses Timeline view to enable better resource distribution and planning. It can be difficult to visualize the spread of tasks when only looking at due dates or scheduled dates in the task window. Timeline gives us a clear overview of busier periods and helps us distribute tasks more efficiently. Overall, we're rarely overwhelmed with several tasks at once. As a result, our tasks are more likely to be completed on time and goals are more likely to be achieved 🤩!

Using Tags for Categorization and Easy Filtering

Imagining a project board full of tasks for your entire company might terrify you. It definitely terrifies me, but this is why we’ve made such good use of tags. We’ve categorized all tasks by department and area of expertise. As a result, it’s really easy to filter the project board and see only what you’re looking for, allowing you to focus on what matters 😍.

Now we've come to the end of this MeisterTask template, can you guess what might come next week? Towards the end of the quarter, with most tasks either completed or very close to completion, it’s time to turn our attention to MeisterNote - the final piece in our triad of terrific tools.

Have you enjoyed finding out how Meister uses MeisterTask for quarterly goal planning? I’d love to hear. Please share your feedback in the comments. You can also import the json file attached here to view the project in your own account, or ask below and I’ll share the project with you in MeisterTask!

project_template-export-503459.json

Until next time,

Farewell!

Miša

Admin BSF.company

In my opinion, this and the companion mind map for Quarterly Goals are two of the most insightful posts in this Community.

Tags for filtering was my favorite feature of this example.

Thanks for producing such valuable ideas @Miša Hennin, keep'm coming 🙌

Best!

Andres

Miša Hennin

Thanks so much @Andres D'Andrea - and thanks for sharing your favourite aspect 😁!

Jens Brinch Moeller

The quick reply to your sharing:

Thanks for producing and sharing such valuable ideas @Miša Hennin 🧐

The longer thoughtful reply:

Being aware of the purpose to share is how the tool can be used with success, I will suggest, that you also include a reference link to a post describing the soft requirements aka "Organizational Maturity" for max benefit of using tools like MeisterTask.

In this community it might not seem as relevant, but… I have seen "ambassadors" convince their management investing in a tool like Meister and as the organization happened to less mature for "project work", the tool turned out to be blaimed for the lack of measurable improvements.

Andrew Lapidus

https://community.meister.co/discussion/comment/4472#Comment_4472

Too true, @Jens Brinch Moeller! I've spoken recently @Joerg Koper about a similar subject. There is certainly no "magic bullet" when it comes to developing the fundamental structure, maturity and communication required to create a successful organization (no matter the size!) and there's no tool in the world that can supplant the soft skills necessary for effective collaboration and teamwork.